Excel 2019 Bible

Chapter 7: Printing Your Work

7

4. When the Page Setup dialog box appears, click OK to close it.


5. Ungroup the sheets by right-clicking any selected sheet and choosing Ungroup
   Sheets from the shortcut menu. Because multiple sheets are selected when you
   close the Page Setup dialog box, the settings of the source sheet will be transferred
   to all target sheets.

Two settings located on the Sheet tab of the Page Setup dialog box are not transferred: Print Area and Print Titles. In

addition, pictures in the header or footer are not transferred.

Preventing certain cells from being printed

If your worksheet contains confidential information, you may want to print the worksheet

but not the confidential parts. You can use several techniques to prevent certain parts of a

worksheet from printing:

Hide rows or columns When you hide rows or columns, the hidden rows or columns

aren’t printed. Choose Home ➪ Cells ➪ Format drop-down list to hide the selected rows or

columns.

Hide cells or ranges by making the text color the same color as the background

color You can hide cells or ranges by making the text color the same color as the back-

ground color. Be aware, however, that this method may not work for all printers.

Hide cells or ranges by using a custom number format You can hide cells by using a

custom number format that consists of three semicolons (;;;). See Chapter 2, “Entering

and Editing Worksheet Data,” for more information about using custom number formats.

Mask an area You can mask a confidential area of a worksheet by covering it with a rect-

angle shape. Choose Insert ➪ Illustrations ➪ Shapes and click Rectangle Shape. You’ll prob-

ably want to adjust the fill color to match the cell background and remove the border.

If you find that you must regularly hide data before you print certain reports, consider

using the Custom Views feature, discussed later in this chapter. (See “Creating custom

views of your worksheet.”) This feature allows you to create a named view that doesn’t

show the confidential information.

Preventing objects from being printed

To prevent objects on the worksheet (such as charts, shapes, and SmartArt) from

being printed, you need to access the Properties tab of the object’s Format dialog box

(see Figure 7.7):

1. Right-click the object and choose Format xxxx from the shortcut menu. (xxxx
   varies, depending on the object.)


2. In the Format dialog box that opens for the object, click the Size & Properties
   icon.